Which relationships are often problematic for the same reasons that they are attractive?

1 Introduction

All human beings are heavily influenced by interpersonal attraction (IA) in their everyday lives, and this has been the case throughout the history of humankind. In this threatening and problematic world, IA may be one of the keys to harmonious relationships, and its absence leaves the door open to negative feelings and negative interpersonal behavior patterns. Clearly, it would be blithe to suggest that social problems can be solved through increased IA; rather, attention should be focused on the major role IA can play in improving personal well-being and interpersonal and social relationships.

Although it contrasts in important ways, IA is firmly linked to other basic feelings and behavior patterns essential for personal well-being and everyday social interaction, such as the need for affiliation (and group processes), fondness, friendship, and love itself. Failure to attract others or to find others attractive often results in adaptive, interpersonal, and psychological problems.

1 What Is Interpersonal Attraction?

Interpersonal attraction is traditionally defined in social psychology as a positive attitude or evaluation regarding a particular person, including the three components conventionally ascribed to attitudes: behavioral (tendency to approach the person), cognitive (positive beliefs about the person), and affective (positive feelings for the person). Another approach treats attraction as the desire to form a friendly or romantic relationship with a particular person. Attraction is often treated as equivalent to liking. Loving, particularly being ‘in love,’ with someone, is sometimes seen as a very strong or special kind of attraction—‘romantic attraction’—including exclusivity and sexual interest. Attraction in the above senses is distinguished from attractiveness—characteristics of people such as good looks or desirable personality that make others be attracted to them.

Interpersonal psychology

Of all attitudes, one of the most interesting is the attitudes of others and factors that influence interpersonal attraction. Attraction is mediated by:

Physical attractiveness: while individuals do not rate this as important, research suggests it does play a major part. People are rated more favourably if with an attractive partner, and photos of attractive people are rated as being more popular.

Proximity: research suggests that one of the best predictors is how close people live to each other. Being in close proximity to someone is likely to promote friendship.

Familiarity: proximity also promotes familiarity and familiarity also increases liking for something or someone.

Similarity: couples tend to have similar interests or outlooks, similar psychological characteristics, e.g. intelligence and physical attributes – assortative mating.

Measuring Friendship in School and Distinguishing Friendship from Peer Acceptance

There is a long tradition extending back to the late 1920s of using sociometric measures, or measures of interpersonal attraction, to identify classroom friendships. Typically children are asked to name their best friends in their class or grade. Researchers can ask children for a limited number of nominations (e.g., their best three friends) or can use an unlimited nomination measure in which children can name all their friends in their class or in their grade. Several improvements have taken place in sociometric friendship assessment over the years. First, children are typically given a roster with names of schoolmates to circle rather than relying on children's ability to recall and write down their classmates’ first and last names. Second, for young children, photographs of schoolmates are used instead of a class roster, again to overcome literacy or memory constraints. Third, researchers have distinguished between unilateral and reciprocal nominations, and most typically define a friendship as existing when two children mutually nominate one another as opposed to one child nominating the other but the other failing to reciprocate the nomination. With this methodology, children can be assigned a score based on the number of reciprocated friendship nominations they have.

Note that the number of friends that children have does not speak to the stability or the more qualitative features of their friendships. To measure the stability of a friendship, repeated sociometric surveys are needed to learn whether friendships are maintained. Furthermore, to learn about the qualitative features of friendships (e.g., levels of companionship, emotional support, or conflict), children can be observed or interviewed about their friendships. Research on stability and qualitative features of friendship indicates that these are extremely important dimensions. For example, children who have more stable friendships and higher-quality friendships are less lonely at school.

Furthermore, it is also important to distinguish children's participation in friendships from their overall acceptance by the peer group. Peer acceptance refers to how well a child is liked by the group as a whole. Peer acceptance is typically measured in one of two ways. One approach is to ask children to nominate three children in their class or grade they like the most and three children they like the least. Researchers then typically calculate a social preference score, which is the number of liked least nominations subtracted from the number of liked most nominations a child receives. This score can be standardized by grade or class and can also be standardized within gender. Alternatively, children can be asked to complete a sociometric rating-scale measure of acceptance in which they rate each of their classmates or grademates on a Likert scale in terms of how much they like each person, or how much they like to play or work with each person. With this measure, acceptance scores are the average ratings received by peers, typically standardized within classroom or grade and gender.

Research using a rating-scale measure of acceptance and mutual friendship nominations to index friendship indicates that children can be well-liked by their peers but not have close friendships at school. Likewise, children can be generally disliked by classmates but still have one or more friends (subgroups of highly aggressive children are likely to be in this situation). Overall, the correlation between the number of mutual friends children have and their acceptance by peers is approximately 0.50, suggesting that there is unique variance associated with each index of peer adjustment. Evidence in support of the friendship-acceptance distinction comes from several lines of inquiry. First, having friends and being liked by peers make distinct contributions to children's early school adjustment. Second, having friends and being accepted by peers independently predict to feelings of loneliness at school and to whether or not children are victimized by peers. Third, children are less likely to form friendships with peers of a different race than they are to like or accept them. Finally, social skills intervention studies have repeatedly found that children can make gains in peer acceptance yet not make gains in their number of good friends.

In the section that follows, the focus is on the effects of friendship on school adjustment; however, several of the supplementary readings may be useful for readers interested in learning more about acceptance and school adjustment.

Interpersonal Attraction

In general, we tend to be attracted to people who display a sense of humor. In the cost-benefit analyses underlying interpersonal attraction (K. S. Cook and Rice, 2003), a sense of humor in another person increases the perceived benefits of a relationship (the pleasant feelings associated with laughter) and decreases the perceived costs (there is less likelihood that the person will become easily offended or burden us with negative emotional reactions). An experiment by Barbara Fraley and Arthur Aron (2004) examined the degree to which a shared humorous experience during a first encounter between strangers leads to greater feelings of closeness. In this study, same-sex stranger pairs participated together in a series of tasks that were designed either to generate a great deal of humor or to be enjoyable but not humorous. After completing these tasks, they were each asked to rate their perceptions of their partner and their feelings on a number of scales, including how close they felt to the other person.

The participants in the humorous task condition laughed much more frequently and rated the activity as being significantly more humorous than did those in the non-humorous condition, indicating that the manipulation of humor was successful. At the same time, the two conditions were rated as being equally enjoyable. As predicted, the participants in the humorous condition reported feeling much closer and more attracted to each other afterwards, as compared to those in the nonhumorous condition. Further analyses revealed that this effect was due to differences in the perceived funniness and not merely the enjoyableness of the conditions.

The authors also tested several hypotheses concerning possible mediators and moderators of the observed effects of shared humor. They found that the effect of humor on perceived closeness was mediated in part by perceptions of “self-expansion” (feeling that one has gained a new perspective on things and a greater sense of awareness as a result of the interaction), as well as by distraction from the initial discomfort associated with interacting with a stranger, but not by perceptions of self-disclosure or greater acceptance by the partner. Furthermore, the effect of humor on closeness was stronger for participants with a greater sense of humor and for those with a more anxious attachment style. In summary, sharing humor in an initial encounter between strangers appears to enhance feelings of closeness and mutual attraction by expanding each person's sense of self and by reducing their feelings of discomfort and anxiety, particularly among people who generally have a good sense of humor as well as those who usually tend to feel anxious about their close relationships.

While we tend to be attracted to people with whom we have a humorous interaction in our first encounter, we may be particularly attracted to those who laugh at our jokes, since this indicates that they share our sense of humor. In an experiment by Arnie Cann and his colleagues, participants were instructed to tell a joke to a same-sex stranger who was actually a confederate of the experimenter (Cann, Calhoun, and Banks, 1997). For half of the subjects, the stranger laughed at the joke, and for the other half he or she did not. Half of the participants were also given information indicating that the stranger held attitudes and beliefs about social issues that were very similar to their own, whereas the other half were led to believe that the stranger held dissimilar views. The participants subsequently rated their perceptions of the stranger and their feelings of attraction to him or her.

As predicted, the results indicated that both greater similarity in attitudes and the stranger's laughter in response to the joke led to more positive perceptions and greater attraction to the stranger. Interestingly, the effect of laughter on the part of the stranger was even powerful enough to overcome the well-established negative effect of attitude dissimilarity on attraction. A stranger with dissimilar social attitudes who laughed in response to the participant's joke was perceived more positively than was a stranger with similar attitudes who did not laugh. The authors suggested that laughter from the stranger indicates that this person has a sense of humor, and, moreover, that he or she shares the subject's style of humor, both of which contribute to positive attraction. These humor perceptions seem to be even more important than the well-established effect on attraction of sharing similar attitudes and beliefs. Viewed in another way, these findings suggest that laughing at the funny things another person says is a way not only of expressing feelings of attraction but also of enhancing one's own attractiveness to the other person (Grammer, 1990).

Biographical Sketch

Viren Swami is a reader at the Department of Psychology, University of Westminster, UK. His main research interests are on the psychology of interpersonal attraction, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. Other research interests include issues relating to body image, including the impact of body art on interpersonal perceptions, weight-based prejudice, and predictors of interest in cosmetic surgery. He is the author of The Missing Arms of Vénus de Milo and (with Adrian Furnham) The Psychology of Physical Attraction, and the editor of Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction.

The Study of Personal Relationships

Personal Relationships, or for some, the ‘science of relationships,’ is an area of study that has grown in the last 20 years from the seeds first planted in the 1950s by Theodore Newcomb's attempts to predict interpersonal attraction in a group of students living in a college housing facility. It grew from Tony Smith's clever method of determining the direction of causality in the liking–similarity correlation (using attitude scales ‘filled out by another student’ [who was actually bogus: the forms were filled out by the experimenter]), which finally enabled researchers to discover the causal effects of specific levels of similarity on the dependent variable of attraction. From these and other inventive approaches sprang considerable subsequent attention by psychologists to the experimental manipulation of the degree of liking or attraction felt toward another person by a particular subject, in particular the monumental work by Donn Byrne.

Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield published, first in 1969 and then again in 1978, two landmark surveys, which are generally recognized as the beginning of the consolidated recognition of the field of study of interpersonal relationships. However, such researchers, mostly social psychologists, treated attraction as essentially an individual attitudinal response to a target person. Despite this one-sided view of the initiation of complex relationships, such research did not overlook cultural factors (e.g., some cultures find slimness attractive while others find plumpness attractive) or the fact that initial attraction did not straightforwardly predict long-term success of relationships. In recent years, work on initial attraction, having served its purpose, has evaporated and been replaced by a multidisciplinary effort to understand the workings of everyday-life personal relationships in the long term, viewing them as complex processes of negotiation and reiteration, routine and novelty, reinvention and continuation.

Personal relationships are long term, socially structured, organized, and relatively enduring interpersonal phenomena that are founded in each person's liking for the other but are much more than that. Personal relationships involve mutual recognition and mutual influence in ways not necessarily true of feelings of initial attraction. They are also both a reflection of a culture's influence and a reflection of the fact that the individuals can create a form of relationship that suits them personally. Thus, two partners may marry (cultural form), but conduct that marriage in a way that contains a number of unique elements and practices.

Historically the field of research into personal relationships was greatly influenced by the research in interpersonal attraction and many leaders in the relationships field were also prominent in the older field at first. However, the research has diversified as researchers have become less satisfied with the idea that attraction ‘causes’ relationships or is in any significant way a predictor of relational outcomes. Also increasingly rejected is the idea that any form of relationship can be determined by the activities or preferences of one person (as is implicit in the notion that one person's attraction to another is the cause of relationships). Finally, the recent emphasis in the personal relationships field on the communicative activity that connects the members of a partnership has caused a move away from an approach that essentially presumed that (success in) relationships could be predicted on the basis of the knowledge of the characteristics of the two partners before they even met. This latter idea is a favorite of the dating agencies, which measure similarities between two people who have not met and then pretend to be able to predict relationship success from there. However, the increasing variety of research has now inevitably replaced this simplistic idea and places far greater emphasis on the interaction that occurs between two people. Some prominent researchers such as John Gottman have been very successful in predicting the outcomes of relationships on the basis of short periods of interaction, particularly during conflict episodes.

3 Group Formation, Commitment, and Identity

A central concept in the study of group processes is ‘group cohesiveness,’ which refers to the overall solidarity of groups, their ‘groupness,’ and the process that transforms an aggregate of unrelated individuals into a psychological group. Through cooperative interdependence in the pursuit of shared goals, people become attracted to one another, to the group, and to the group's goals. In this way a group forms, and its overall cohesiveness is an arithmetic combination of individual members' attraction to one another and the group. This attraction-to-group—or interpersonal attraction—analysis has not gone unchallenged, and recent perspectives place an emphasis on some form of commitment to group, or self-definition in terms of group membership (Hogg 1992). For instance, social identity theory does not consider attraction-to-group to be the basic process of group formation, but rather one of a range of consequences of a process of identification with the group (i.e., self-categorization in terms of the group's defining features—see Social Identity, Psychology of). Moreland and Levine (e.g. 1994) have developed a ‘group socialization model’ to address what they consider to be a lack of diachronic perspective in many models of group formation and development. Commitment is considered the most basic process. People become committed to a group, and a group to its members, through bilateral cost-benefit analyses of membership in this group relative to other groups. As mutual commitment rises or ebbs, members move in and out of different general roles within the group (e.g., new member, ‘oldtimer’)—a process characterized by role transitions that are quite marked, and which can involve public rites of passage.

2 Definition of a Sport Team

In 1998, Carron and Hausenblas defined a sport team as follows:

a collection of two or more individuals who possess a common identity, have common goals and objectives, share a common fate, exhibit structured patterns of interaction and modes of communication, hold common perceptions about group structure, are personally and instrumentally interdependent, reciprocate interpersonal attraction, and consider themselves to be a group.

This definition incorporates the significant attributes of a group highlighted previously by other scholars. One attribute is that the members of the group have a common identity. Although having their unique names, uniforms, coaches, and support groups indicates a separate identity for every team, it is equally important that members accept that identity, share it, and consider themselves to be part of the group. The goals and objectives of sport teams may vary across levels of competition (e.g., winning in pursuit of excellence, learning and having fun in pursuit of pleasure). Another significant attribute is that the group members share a common fate. When a team loses, everyone on the team loses. When a team is disqualified for rule violations committed by some members, all members suffer. Members of a sport team, in sharing a common goal and fate, also have a common understanding of the way in which the team is structured, the manner and mode of communications within the team (including the technical terminology associated with the sport, e.g., what do “screening” in basketball and “stealing” in baseball mean?), and the terms used in the special plays unique to the team. Members also recognize that they are interdependent on each other to achieve the team goals. Given these attributes, members tend to develop a liking for each other (i.e., the interpersonal attraction).

1.2 Social Processes in Sport and Exercise

The beginnings of research on productivity in sport teams and about spectators' influence on performance can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century. Sport and exercise are often performed in groups or teams, and therefore social processes are deemed highly significant (Carron and Hausenblas 1998). Team cohesion, leadership, and aspects of group composition on individual and group outcomes are the most important topics. Whereas in the beginning cohesion was regarded as interpersonal attraction between team members, i.e., social cohesion, at the beginning of the twenty-first century cohesion in sport teams is conceptualized and assessed as social and task cohesion. The positive relationship of group cohesion and performance has been well-documented for sport teams and is mainly based on task cohesion. This relationship is quite robust, and exists irrespective of the group task. For example, highly cohesive handball, rowing, or golf teams alike are more successful than low cohesive teams. Less is known about the causal paths of the relationship. There is convincing evidence that success fosters cohesion more than vice versa (Mullen and Copper 1994). Looking at the relationship of cohesion and adherence to sport and exercise reliable differences can be found between dropouts perceiving a lower cohesion and adherers perceiving a higher coherence in exercise groups and in sport teams. Perceived high cohesion may lead to more satisfaction of the group members and their overall attraction to the group, whereas perceived low cohesion reduces the motivation to stay in the group. This result is of high importance for any setting, be it exercise, recreational, or competitive sport.

The predominant approaches to leadership behavior of coaches in sport are the mediational model of Smoll and Smith (1989) and the multidimensional model of Chelladurai (see Chelladurai and Riemer 1998). The mediational model was developed in youth sport and postulates that the effects of the coaches' behaviors are mediated by the meaning that players attribute to them. Smoll and Smith (1989) could demonstrate that coaches who give general technical instruction, who prefer positive feedback, and who give mistake-contingent instruction and encouragement are evaluated most highly by their athletes. Training in these skills led to more positive evaluation of youth sport coaches, to fewer dropouts from their groups, and to an increase in the athletes' self-esteem and in team cohesion compared to nontrained youth sport coaches. However, the coaches' behaviors had no direct impact on the athletes' performance.

The multidimensional model of leadership (MDL) by Packianathan Chelladurai postulates that individual and group outcomes (satisfaction and performance) are dependent on the congruence among required, actual, and preferred leader behavior. Preferred and perceived leader behavior is measured with a five-dimensional questionnaire called the Leadership Scale for Sports (LSS). This instrument has been tested and validated in quite a few studies with athletes and coaches in various sport contexts and countries, in North America, Asia, and Europe. Research was primarily focused on the perception of coach behavior by adult and high-level athletes. The relationship to outcome measures is inconclusive. Future research has to focus on this relationship between coaches' behavior and outcome measures such as performance and satisfaction in the group.